It’ll take more than a flight scare to put me on the side of volcano lovers

IT was a scene straight out of some disaster movie. Last month I was taking an internal flight in India, leaving at 9pm.

I had been up since 4am so, seatbelt fastened, I was soon in the Land of Nod. Nearly two hours later, I woke up and checked my watch. “We should have landed ages ago,” I thought to myself, but just assumed there was congestion.

Seconds later, the captain was on: “I regret to inform you we have a problem with the landing gear and only 25 minutes of fuel left.” A sudden hush descended. Then a few people started chanting. I reached for the Blackberry and started typing that email we all hoped we’d never have to send. As for the man sitting next to me, I did not know what his connection with his God was like. I just knew I had no reception – too high up in the clouds.

But before I could get beyond explaining in my message what was wrong, the captain was back: “We have sorted the problem and will be landing shortly.”

Cue heartfelt applause. He shook hands with each of us as we disembarked. What had seemed like an age was probably no more than a couple of panic-stricken minutes. I lived to tell the tale.

I always try to be rational. Of course, I know I have probably been much closer to death hundreds of times while driving a car.

Some idiot pulls out in front of you, misses you and you have a sharp intake of breath. You curse him and forget all about it. Being on a plane 25 minutes from a crash landing, on the other hand, is not something you forget easily.

Should that stop us from flying? Don’t be silly. But there is a small army of bureaucrats and so-called environmentalists who are determined to frustrate us.

Instead of the millions of air passengers who have been stranded and missed important meetings, well-deserved holidays and longed-for reunions with friends and family because of the volcanic ash, they take the side of the poor unfortunate souls who live under flight paths and can hear the thrushes singing again.

For them, the Eyjafjallajökull eruption is a cause for celebration, a well-deserved reminder that we are not masters of all we survey. They drag on the people unlucky enough to live near airports as stage victims whose lives are ruined by big business.

But having had to take the train and the boat again to get back to Ireland the other day, I can tell you it isn’t much fun. It’s not romantic; it’s tedious. Yet for the self-appointed guardians of the planet, it’s a timely reminder of what the world might look like that happy day when the oil runs out.

Still, judging by the millions of people who take to the skies every day, the anti-flying lobby has not been able to convince very many of us that the road to hell is a runway.

For me, the flying ban has brought home just how much poorer life would be without the freedom of flight, how isolated we would become.

No quick delivery of international post, no exotic food to eat, no easy way of seeing the world and the people we love. That cousin’s wedding in Boston forsaken in exchange for a downloadable video recording? Christmas using Skype instead of around the table tucking in with family and friends? No thanks.

Nor do I think being stuck in some airport waiting for these intermittent bans to be rescinded is reason for rejoicing either. Some try frantically to find alternative means of getting to their destinations. Others just accept their fate and avail of the round-the-clock beer.

A few simply fire coins into machines every couple of minutes and surf the net as a form of distraction, drinking rubbishy coffee to keep themselves awake in case the flight situation changes.

Cause for celebration? I think not.

But for the anti-flying curmudgeons all this speaks to their belief in the decadence of contemporary living. Smugly, they try to extract from all the chaos some wider social commentary on western society. How quickly supposedly highly developed nations crumble in the face of natural catastrophe, they note wryly.

Such notions ignore some basic lessons. What we call chaos – sleeping on the floor of an airport lounge – is actually just temporary inconvenience. Conversely, recent events such as the earthquake in Haiti remind us that it is undeveloped societies lacking modern technologies which really collapse in the face of Mother Nature.

The Haitian earthquake was a disaster, exacerbated by shoddy building standards. Thousands died, many quite needlessly.

But as a result of the ash cloud, how many have died? Precisely none. Now all those aviation authorities would say that is because they have done their monitoring and made ever-so-wise recommendations which politicians have gladly accepted without question.

But haven’t we been here before? Ours is a world where tiny risks are blown out of all proportion. Did our lives grind to a halt as a result of the millennium bug? Whatever happened to the billion who were predicted to die from swine flu?

The precautionary principle – acting on the basis of worst case scenarios – has replaced rigorous risk assessment. Fear of what might happen if an aeroplane flew through the ash cloud has turned into a conclusion that it would most certainly drop out of the sky.

Imagine if you applied the precautionary principle in your everyday life. No one would ever enter into a relationship in case it didn’t work out. No one would ever drive above 8km/h. Your best bet would be to lie in bed, albeit paralysed by fear because some expert somewhere predicts a meteorite is going to fall on top of you.

NO ONE is suggesting volcanic ash is anything but potentially very bad for jet engines, but the growing suspicion must be that the bans are a bit OTT.

Some of us really do seem to be regressing to some primeval state of volcano worship, as if what’s puffing out of Iceland is punishment by the gods for ever having the temerity to get on a flight to a hen party in Amsterdam.

All this disruption, then, on the basis of a BA flight in 1982 over Indonesia which plummeted and whose windscreen was turned opaque by ash, and a KLM flight which flew very close to a volcano in Alaska in 1989 and whose engines juddered.

But test flights in Europe recently have uncovered no such severe effects. The concentrations of ash particles in those earlier incidents were far higher than have been found in the last few weeks, it would appear.

On the basis of a theoretical risk, however – often determined using computer modelling rather than actual test flights – millions of people have been massively inconvenienced.

I’m happy for the people sitting in their gardens listening to the birds, but isn’t it time politicians took these decisions rather than forever passing the buck to experts with an interest in boosting their own fields of science?

Would I get on a flight out of Ireland tomorrow? For sure. Get on another internal flight in India? Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?